(not a deal)Should we stay away from Soundspot plugin now?

[satya]

https://synthanatomy.com/2023/06/soundspot-is-the-plugin-developer-company-out-of-business.html

First, the developer’s website https://www.soundspot.audio/ no longer exists. Already a few months ago it was reported that the domain was offered for sale. Then the activities on social media are stopped. The Twitter account is deleted, and they published the last post on Facebook in 2021. (From article)

Thir Axis plugin is good tho

[Starship Krupa]

Soundspot has a few gems, but nothing that you can't get elsewhere for free or cheap. They've always been kind of a weird company. Missing manuals on the website, no contact info.

W.A. Production is kind of the "new and improved" Soundspot. They have deep discounts, appeal to fledgling producers and have cool-looking GUI's. The quality of the processing is typically better, too.

[satya]

15 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

W.A. Production

I see them more of a sample pack company who is surviving because of their music theory vst plugins

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

10 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

W.A. Production is kind of the "new and improved" Soundspot.

Isn't Mastering the Mix just that?

[dubdisciple]

13 minutes ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

Isn't Mastering the Mix just that?

I think Mastering the Mix is more of a great value Izotope than an improved WA. 🤣

[Paul P]

14 hours ago, SATYA said:

First, the developer’s website https://www.soundspot.audio/ no longer exists.

The site still exists, it's just down...

If the company is out of action, I wonder how Plugin Boutique came up with an authorizing program ?

Maybe they now have full control of the software ?  Or they just called in a favour ?

[Starship Krupa]

6 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

Isn't Mastering the Mix just that?

Not in my opinion. The UI's have a similarity (which I like), but only ANIMATE is similar in function to something you might find from Soundspot, a multifunction widget to "pump up" your track/mix. The rest of the line features a bunch of analysis tools and what seem to be iZotope-ish mixing/mastering tools. They'd also have to go on sale every 6 months for 1/4 list price, which they don't (unfortunately, because I wouldn't mind updating my version of EXPOSE).

LEVELS is on every custom template of mine.

The flat, neon-on-black animated UI, the "instant recipe"/"I don't know how it works but it makes it sound better" design philosophy, the deep discount pricing structure, those were the similarities that I was referring to. Although WA Production has plenty of products that don't fit that description, they have several that do.

BTW, it was with a Soundspot plug-in that I noticed that due to their not using OpenGL to offload animations to the GPU, some of those pretty animations are expensive in terms of processing. Not all of their stuff is like that.

The answer to the topic title is probably "we should have started staying away from Soundspot around the time W.A. Production hit the scene." Cyclone is still nice if you're into mid/side compression because it puts all the controls and metering on the front page, and it leaves no parameters out. Attack, release, knee, gain, saturation, threshold, meters, everything's right there X2. The parameters can be locked to each other or used independently (which is how I use it, in mid/side mode). That and Voxbox are about the only SoundSpot products I still use.

[iNate]

SoundSpot was always junk discountware. 

[Brian Walton]

1 hour ago, iNate said:

SoundSpot was always junk discountware. 

Glitch actually made it on a main track of a project I did, not bad for something I must have got for under $5.

I thought they had a few plugins that when sold for a few bucks were just fine for the spend thrifts.   Of course I do t think they were worth anything close to the retail rates, but I say the same thing about the vast majority of plugins.